I originally posted this as a comment on the recent piece America, Beacon of Freedom and Liberty posted here by Geov Parrish. The article was about most of the rest of the world’s rapidly declining view of the US as colored by the Republican presidential wannabe clown act currently in progress all over our hypnomedia.
I personally think that this view is permanent, and cannot possibly decline much further than has already been the case since the late ’50s/early ’60s.
Why has this happened?
Read on for my own view if you so desire.
Read on.
The following is simply the truth of the matter.
The facts ma’am.
Just the facts.
Bet on it.
The average intelligence…the average accurate perception of the reality in which we live…of American citizens is not very high when compared that of the citizens of many other countries.
Why? How?
Genetics as much as anything else.
We are largely a nation of losers. Of descendants of losers.
Sorry, but there it is.
There we are.
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!-Emma Lazarus, 1883
“Wretched refuse” indeed.
Brave losers, though. Aspiring to something higher. Like the people of Israel, only much, much more numerous. “Never again?” In spades. For several centuries.
What happened to those aspirations?
What happened is that the eventual winners among those losers trampled the rest of the population. Just as it’s always been; just as it’s always been.
“One more time once,” as Count Basie used to say.
Those “losers” wanted more. They struggled upwards. They sent their children to school. They watched as those children grew and learned and prospered. They watched in pride as those children built a new land, the strongest, most prosperous country in the world, as they marched off to fight against the kinds of people who had chased them from their homelands in the first place. Fought and won. As they fought against their own worst tendencies. As they learned to accept the differences of others. As they tried to correct the wrongs that had happened during the earlier years of the growth of this country. Racial wrongs. Social wrongs.
But then something happened. It all reverted to form. The same kinds of people who dominated those losers in their native countries won out. They took control of the information services. They took control of the educational system. They took control of the government. And the descendants of those brave losers just sat there and ate their execrable fast food.
Watched their foolish reality shows.
Voted for their idiot representatives.
They acquiesced.
And here we are.
There is a saying among horse racing people.
“Class tells.”
You know what it means?
It means that even if a horse the lineage of which is not very stellar wins a few races, eventually that horse is going to start losing.
And here we are again.
Losing.
So it goes.
What to do?
Damned if I know.
Leave?
The temptation arises.
Try to get through to these people? Try to tell them the reality of their situation? Try to wake them the fuck up again? Try to warn them that this time there will be no place left to run?
I dunno.
Apparently Ron Paul can’t, although he is making a truly heroic effort to do so.
I certainly can’t.
They just sit there, chewing away on their nutritionless Bachman burgers, their Cain pizzas, Romney turnovers and Obama half smokes, oblivious to everything except whatever the hypnomedia tells them is happening. Dumb to the world.
Reverting to form.
Here’s what a wise man once said about this sort of thing.
The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime, and punishment of his guilt.-John Philpot Curran from his speech on the Right of Election of Lord Mayor of Dublin, July 10, 1790.
Servitude.
The consequence of the crime and the punishment of the guilt.
Too big to fail?
Maybe it’s more like too dumb to succeed.
That’s what I’m seeing today, anyway.
Bet on it.
My mother served in the Royal Canadian Air Force during the Battle of Britain. She and my father were Americans, but they essentially eloped in 1939 to join the RCAF and go fight the Nazis. He flew Spitires and she was a radar operator, both in Great Britain. Neither one of them liked to talk much about what they did or what they experienced during that time, but one thing that my mother often said was that she developed a real loathing for Americans after the US joined the war effort in 1941. She used to tell stories about how civilized the Brits were, what a good time was had in the pubs before the Americans descended on the scene and what louts the Americans seemed after a couple of years with the Brits. “Smashing glasses and grabbing after the girls” was her capsule description of the American troops.
Maybe what we are seeing is just another example of “class tells.” Maybe the initial success of America was more a testament to its vast, untapped natural resources than it was to the quality of its settlers.
Maybe the US is simply finding its true level.
That’s how it looks from here, anyway.
So it goes.
Just as it’s always been.
Just as it’s always been.
“One more time once.”
And so it goes.
Say!!! I wonder what Newt has to say, Mabel?
And here we go again.
Down.
Down like a motherfucker!!!
Sad to see.
Watch.
AG
